Seaport stories

Nicholas Woodsworth's trilogy charts the historic and cultural ties connecting the Mediterranean's great cities: Alexandria, Venice and Istanbul. The result is something to be cherished, says Rory MacLean

Istanbul ... once capital of an empire which stretched across half of Asia and Europe. Photograph: Emilio Suetone/Hemis/Corbis

Seaport stories

Nicholas Woodsworth's trilogy charts the historic and cultural ties connecting the Mediterranean's great cities: Alexandria, Venice and Istanbul. The result is something to be cherished, says Rory MacLean

Of all the world's continents only the Mediterranean is liquid, wrote Jean Cocteau. It's a refreshing thought. The Med is not an empty space. It's a continent whose citizens inhabit its coastal rim. They look inwards across the water, rather than over their shoulders towards some landlocked capital. Paris is nothing like Cairo. Rome has little in common with Rabat. Yet in their characters coastal "Marseilles is very much like Alexandria. Marseilles and Alexandria have the same way of looking at the world. Barcelona, Thessalonica, Tangier, Palermo, Beirut, Valletta ... walk down the street in any of those ports and you feel the same thing. Why is that?"

So asks Nicholas Woodsworth at the start of his enchanting journey around the old seaports of the eastern Mediterranean. The son of a Canadian diplomat and former Financial Times correspondent, Woodsworth wants to understand what makes a true Mediterranean. He is curious how environment and history have conspired to instil in them "a capacity for connection, a sense of attachment and belonging, that in most places in the western world is fast unravelling".

As late as the 1930s, a quarter of Alexandria's residents were European. Photograph: JonArnold/JAI/Corbis
Two thousand years ago, Alexandria was one of the great trading capitals of the world. It was a mythic place divinely sanctioned, a splendid tapestry woven from the threads of a dozen cultures, the first true metropolis. As late as the 1930s, a quarter of the residents were European, including cosmopolitans like EM Forster and Lawrence Durrell. But on the winter day that Woodsworth arrived in town, Alexandria appeared rundown and dilapidated, its "doorways grubby and paw-marked by an unrelenting press of humanity". Its classical remains had been destroyed. Its fin-de-siècle villas abandoned. Its new, densely-packed high-rise suburbs offered incomers little comfort or hope of improvement. In the port Woodsworth found ample evidence of the Mediterranean character yet its few remaining multicultural residents – a Greco-Alexandrian architect, a Syrian Christian princess, a French archaeologist – drifted towards oblivion like so many antiquities.

Passenger ships no longer sail from the first "globalised" city – at least not out of season – so Woodsworth boards a bus to trace the Med's eastern rim. As he makes for Italy, by way of Aqaba, Damascus and Aleppo, his narrative comes to life. He meets an Iraqi Christian who is "goofy about God", a Chechen Sergeant Pepper who mimes the destruction of Grozny and two loquacious, "bubble-brained ditzes" named Cath and Viv. In Venice his vibrant and irrepressible Provençal wife Jany joins him, and his touching enthusiasm for her, as well as her gift for communication, further energises his journey. She becomes a mirror for the Mediterranean spirit, reflecting its sensuality, spontaneity and intimate attachment to essential things: intense colours, strong flavours, landscape, family and friends.

With the help of a gondola-builder Woodsworth unravels the story of Venice. Photograph: Guenter Rossenbach/zefa/Corbis
With the help of a gondola-builder and while working as a canal-boat delivery man, Woodsworth unravels the story of Venice. Then he carries on alone to Istanbul, capital of an empire which once stretched across half of Asia and Europe. He settles into a former Benedictine monastery overlooking the Golden Horn and considers the fate of that city's ethnic complexity. Years ago "a Constantinopolite could be a Greek Jew, a Syrian Christian or a Hungarian Muslim. At the same time, however, he could feel still himself thoroughly Ottoman". On the banks of the Bosphorus, Woodsworth considers the legacy of the "cosmopolitan influence that blurred origins, that made for a wider sense of identity".

Beautifully packaged in three compact hardbacks, The Liquid Continent is a Mediterranean trilogy to cherish. Woodsworth is a likeable and informed narrator with a gentle manner and lively, accessible style. He embarks on no flights of fancy yet the work does not suffer for this journalistic approach, though some of his minor characters could have been more developed. His succinct overview of the cities' histories, especially that of Venice, is particularly illuminating. After reading that volume, I couldn't wait to glide again along the Grand Canal (even if the enchanting Jany has returned home to Provence).

Most provoking is Woodsworth's warning against the acid of nationalism. Alexandria has abandoned its cosmopolitan heritage and turned its back on the Mediterranean to embrace Egypt and the Middle East. Equally, the Most Serene Venetian Republic is now simply part of Italy and Europe, its vibrant Asian links confined to history. Yet for Woodsworth – an optimistic child of the New World, not blinded by cultural chauvinism – contemporary Istanbul offers the bravest solution to the future, in a careful, respectful balancing of traditionalism, modern secularism and globalisation. In a fragmented world the Mediterranean has always been a place of contact and exchange. As a Syrian painter in a French restaurant in Damascus tells him, the old harbours on the sea have a great many lessons to teach us today.

·Rory MacLean's latest book Magic Bus: On the Hippie Trail from Istanbul to India is published by Penguin. It is available to buy from the Guardian Bookshop